NJC Advisory Council hears about behavior intervention team

College offering free Summer Bridge program to help students fill the gap

Callie Jones Journal-Advocate staff writer

Posted:
04/22/2013 08:05:03 AM MDT

STERLING — Northeastern Junior College is taking the mental health of its students very seriously. Steve Smith, dean of student services, spoke about the work NJC's behavior intervention team is doing related to students and their mental health during an Advisory Council meeting last week.

The team came about because of the National Behavioral Intervention Team Association (NaBITA). In 2009, the association put out a paper, “Threat Assessment in the Campus Setting.” It said that because of campus shootings and other emerging issues, colleges and universities responded by implementing a variety of campus safety initiatives, including the creation of behavioral intervention teams.

“A core function of these teams is threat assessment and early intervention,” Smith said.

A few weeks ago the team from NJC -- which includes Smith; Scott Thompson, chair of the liberal arts department; David McNabb, director of residence life and student activities; Misti Lauer, director of the Comprehensive Learning Center; and Cindy Carey, counselor -- attended a NaBITA training, along with NJC President Jay Lee.

“Really what the training was about was implementing behavioral intervention teams on your campus, training people on how to use NaBITA's threat assessment tool and then meeting on a regular basis as a team and looking at students who are referred,” Smith said.

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Students might be referred for serious issues, like suicidal thoughts, but also low level issues.

After trying to replicate on college campuses what's affective in a law enforcement setting and then a mental health setting, NaBITA came up with an ideal model for college campuses.

As part of that model, something new colleges can do now “is if we really see somebody needs to have a mental health assessment, we can mandate that,” Smith said.

“If somebody just really strikes a concern for us and we've looked at their referral and looked at, maybe it's a pattern of behavior that's happened in different places on the campus, this team can connect those pieces together and say ‘well, this happening all over, let's make sure the person gets an assessment.'”

Centennial Mental Health is working closely with NJC to help them do this. Smith said they've had to mandate assessments twice since the training.

“It's not discipline -- we're not disciplining students. We're saying, ‘You know what, you need to go and get assistance for this issue, for these things that have come up,'” Smith said. “It's caring, but it's preventative.”

To help determine if a student needs an assessment, the NaBITA model has colleges assess students based on the five levels of risk – mild, moderate, elevated, severe and extreme -- and the D scale, which includes distress, disturbance, dysregulation and mental disability.

Smith said the hope is that with this system “maybe we will be able to identify somebody who, if we hadn't caught early, might have done something more severe down the road.”

In other business, Stanton Gartin, vice president of academic services, shared information about the Summer Bridge Program the college is planning.

Funding for the program came from an initiative from the Colorado Community College System; they provided $100,000 to each school. Originally, NJC intended to use the money to install wireless on campus, however after being told that that was not an appropriate use of funding, they decided to use it for a Summer Bridge Program.

“It's a program that's designed to deal with students that are taking those remedial and developmental education classes, and pre-college level classes,” Lee said.

Gartin said this will probably be a one-time, free opportunity for students to take some coursework “that will help them close the gap.”

“When we refer to closing the gap, we're talking about getting them ready for college level coursework.”

Within developmental education there are three levels – 030, 060 and 090.

“The goal of our Summer Bridge Program is to focus on that upper end, that 90 level student, who really just needs a little more background in one or two areas,” Gartin said. “Then they will be ready for college level courses, meaning college algebra, English comp 1, typically would be the two courses that we would hopefully have them ready to start in the fall.”

The program is geared toward high school juniors and seniors, incoming college freshman and current NJC students.

Classes covered under the program are MAT 096 (combined intro/intermediate algebra), ENG 090 (basic composition), and REA 090 (college preparatory reading). They will also incorporate an AAA 101 (college 101-student experience) class, “helping them kind of understand the mechanics and how to survive in college,” Gartin said.

Students will be able to take three classes at most and classes will be two to two and a half hours, four mornings a week. Cost of tuition, fees and books for all classes will be covered by the funds from CCCS.

Students will be expected to complete homework. NJC will provide tutoring services to help them with their work, free of charge also.

Gartin said there is a challenge in that students and parents, especially at a high school level, might not know “if they're at this level, where they need a little more coursework.”

He pointed out that students have taken an Accuplacer test while in high school, as well as the ACT test, which would be indicators of whether or not the student is ready.

Another challenge is getting students to want to take classes in the summer.

“We hope that the incentive of it being free and for them to really make a big step in being ready for college, we hope that's incentive enough for them to attract a good number of students from our area into that,” Gartin said.

They hope to get students from outside the local communities, maybe from Haxtun, Holyoke, Otis, Akron or Yuma.

Lee pointed out that many students who have to take these remedial classes use their financial aid to do so, but with this program they won't have to.

He also shared that he worked with a similar program at another college and they found that “those students who went through that program, compared to other students that paid for those classes during the regular fall semester, the Summer Bridge students succeeded at a far high rate and they were retained at a far higher rate and they graduated at a far higher rate.”

For more information on the program contact Misti Lauer at (970) 521-6619.

RE-1 Valley School District has announced its policy for determining eligibility of children who may receive free and reduced price meals served under the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Program.
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